Anthony Coleman

Duke Ellington

If I start to talk about Ellington it would be a conversation of several hours - at the very least. He was really the key figure in my early artistic life. He was my model; he was my guru. Everybody who knew me when I was growing up knew this. It was a beautiful accident of history that I was able to spend those last couple of years of High School in close contact with the Ellington Band and I got to spend some time at Duke’s elbow. Of course I was too young for any of this, but Thank God I was able to do it, because had it been just a couple years later it would not have happened. But I also have to say that I’m very lucky that I was marked by Monk and Cecil Taylor at the same time, because it made me understand that taking Ellingtonisms literally was not going to be the way that I could honor Duke’s importance to me in the deepest way. I think it’s a shame that this aspect of Cecil’s work – his radical reshaping of Duke’s influence on him - is still so polarizing for some people. I guess it speaks to its power, but I still find people so limited in their inability to hear the way that a great artist transforms influence into their own vision when the stylistic markers are pretty radically different.

Downtown 

I fell into the Downtown Scene almost by accident. My mother was living in a loft on Mercer Street in Soho and I started working at the Soho Music Gallery, which was a record store, and within a couple of months out of grad school I was playing with both John Zorn and Glenn Branca. I met them both through the store, and I made my first two records with them. It’s really the craziest story. I felt so destabilized at the end of Yale School of Music that I really didn’t know what happens next and this is what happened next. It’s kind of a miracle - it makes me believe in fate.

John Zorn

For years John was like a guru to me. I used to always say that he was like my last teacher. His approach was so different from the approach of New England Conservatory, in that he was very similar in the way that he assimilated so many musical languages, but he was very different in the way that he treated them very haphazardly and casually and with a lot of insouciance. Like when Ran talks about his influences there’s always so much aura around them – it’s always almost like he’s talking about some kind of a saint. John helped me to let go of respect;his example enabled meto see that you could not look up at these people all the time. It’s the same thing that Stravinsky talks about in The Poetics of Music.

But our relationship was very complicated by being colleagues, peers, working together, my working for him under his direction…there were too many kinds of ways of being. I stopped playing with him in 1999 and I always say that I loved the 20 years that I played with him and I have loved the 20 years that I have not played with him.

The 80's

The ‘80s were fantastic but the ‘90s were really my decade because in the ‘80s most of my great moments were with John and starting in ‘89 I started doing my own tours and I started playing with Ribot and putting out my own records, so objectively the ‘80s were more exciting in terms of the scene getting together and so on, but in terms of my own life and my own career the ‘90s were waymore exciting.

Cecil Taylor

Well, I already talked a little bit about Cecil, but I’ll say a little more. I was very lucky in high school to have had a girlfriend who also loved his music and we used to go to hear Cecil as much as possible, and that was an amazing time because it was the group with Cyrille and Jimmy Lyons and that was some truly life-changing music. I was following Ellington but the really life-changing gigs were those gigs. They showed me what kind of thing collective improvisation could be when people were feeling time the same way and really had some sense of shared velocity without necessarily having shared material, like the warp and woof of parts intersecting – you can hear that on certain records pretty well, Student Studies in particular.

And then there are all the awesome challenges of Cecil as a pianist. I really like that book of Harold Bloom’s - The Anxiety of Influence  - and I think a lot about that in relation to Cecil. Like, he laid down a certain gauntlet in many ways. Technically, and also in his harmonic and gestural language. A lot of people have just kind of sidestepped it because it’s really daunting - how to go beyond it and what “beyond it” would look like. Not in the sense of “progress”, because I don’t think that Bud Powell is “progress” beyond Stride Piano necessarily, but you can see what Bud kept and what he threw away from Swing piano - it’s very clear. What he felt the language needed, what he thought was missing, what he thought was too much. With Cecil, 40 years later I still have some of these questions, which is kind of ridiculous, but it’s true. I haven’t answered them for myself completely, and listening to people like Craig Taborn or Mat Shipp or Marilyn Crispell doesn’t necessarily answer them for me, either.

Jazz

Which brings us to Jazz, and I guess there is the problem that Jazz always felt so vital to me and it was always in such an intense flux; there was always so much craziness in what was coming out. I remember first hearing the Art Ensemble, first hearing Bitches Brew, all that kind of stuff – all the controversy in the energy around that. I try to stay abreast of whatever feels kind of new; I listen to whatever Matt Mitchell does or whatever Steve Lehman does or whatever Tyshawn does etc. but I can’t really say that it feels the same. But then again, I am 64!

As far as more contemporary Mainstream Jazz is concerned, I’ll just say that I used to know somebody who really followed it, and whenever a new Mainstream guy came out he was all enthusiastic (still is, but I don’t really know him anymore). Like, for example, he said about Roy Hargrove - when he first came to New York, “he sounds like Clifford, but he’s got his own thing going on” and that was exciting to him, and me, I always appreciate good musicianship, but I have to say that that’s as far as I’ll go with that part of the conversation. I think I’m looking elsewhere for my thrills nowadays.

Ken Burns

Ken Burns… the problem with Ken Burns is not Ken Burns. I’ve done a lot of critical reading and I spent a lot of time reading about Middlebrow Culture in America. There’s a way that culture is packaged; there are certain ways to make something accessible. There are certain kinds of Creation Myths that are very seductive and very attractive and help make things palatable and make things understandable to a general audience that wants to know a certain amount about something and wants to feel that they’re on top of general knowledge; they don’t want to have to dig too deep but deep enough to be able to carry on a semi - intellectual conversation on a given subject, in this case Jazz. There was some beautiful footage. There were some dreadful clichés. There was too much about Hello Dolly. They insulted the Avant Garde. It was several hours about Jazz on television and that’s a good thing.

The Piano

Playing the piano is super strange. For many years I didn’t even think of myself as a pianist. When I would listen to some Tadd Dameron record and Fats Navarro would be playing his head off and the music is incredible and Tadd would take some lame four bars I would say “I totally get that”. But then there was Monk. So I was always very conflicted. And then there’s practicing. And then there’s composing. And then there’s movie watching. And then there’s traveling. And then there’s a love life. And then there’s eating. But then things happened, and I started to think about the piano in a different way and now I really think I am a pianist, but it’s been a very slow process and I could definitely talk about it and it would be so much in terms of details - oh my God, you wouldn’t even believe it; every little thing every little thing - I remember everything. Now I can’t listen to people who don’t practice, even when they’re great. Sometimes I’m listening to Mal Waldron and I’m saying “oh man, you get away with murder! It’s just like - what the hell! Like it’s cool that you have all those cool sounds and everything, but you should learn to move your fingers!” Yes, I’ve become that guy. For better or worse. It’s not that I don’t love Mal Waldron. It’s more that I recognize myself in him - it’s one of those psychological things: the things that drive you crazy about somebody else are definitely things that come from things that you recognize in yourself.

Underrated

I actually think that when it comes to underrated it’s not as many people as I imagine at first. It’s funny: I make those lists and then there really aren’t that many. There are definitely the obvious ones. Herbie Nichols, of course. In a sense, James P Johnson, even though he gets his due as an historical figure, but not as much as a pianist as he should although that’s changing. Henry Red Allen because he was always in Armstrong’s shadow. Stefan Wolpe, for similar reasons. Lots of people love Janacek, but most people don’t realize how radical he really is. But ultimately it’s not that many.

Overrated

Should I really do overrated? I mean all the overrated people are good - they’re just not as good as they’re supposed to be. I mean Benny Goodman is fantastic but he’s horribly overrated. Oscar Peterson is horrendously overrated as far as I’m concerned. That doesn’t take away from the fact that he’s an amazing musician. The one that people hate me for is Ella Fitzgerald. All the canonical modern pianists are overrated – except maybe McCoy Tyner. Jarrett, Corea, Hancock. Also Brad Mehldau. Good, now everyone despises me. Well, you asked!

Third Stream

Third Stream is so interesting because I was at school when Gunther was still there and it has had an enormous influence on my life, and yet at the same time I’m so critical of its binaries. I mean Gunther may have eventually recognized that those binaries were limiting but he just never seemed to be able to transcend the way we feel their presence: here is the Jazz part, here’s the classical part…The job of the next generation was to efface those binaries or boundaries, but once you efface them then the term Third Stream just doesn’t do the trick anymore.

Choice whom to have dinner with from “the other side”...

So many dead people I’d love to eat with. How many can I choose? Obviously I’d love to meet Jelly Roll Morton. He might have to be my number one. I could’ve met Stefan Wolpe - it’s too bad that I didn’t. He’d probably be a more fun dinner companion than Jelly Roll. But the most fun dinner companion would probably be somebody like Frank O’Hara. I love Luis Bunuel’s movies, but somehow I don’t think he would be that much fun as a dinner companion because he was pretty deaf and he screamed a lot - because he didn’t realize he was screaming.

Adorno

Adorno got me through some really tough times. Especially in grad school because I couldn’t understand or I didn’t have any language to talk about how it felt like people were selling out when there was no money to sell out for - and what are you selling out for if you’re not selling out for money? And what is the system that would still create this paradigm? Where does it come from? Adorno’s writing on the Culture Industry and books like The Jargon of Authenticity helped give me a language and a vocabulary to talk about things that I was intuiting and ways in which I felt like I just couldn’t play certain kinds of games that were around me. On the other hand, his joyless hectoring has had some negative effects on my ability to just kind of converse rather than lecture at times and I’ve definitely been on my high horse as a dyed - in -the - wool Adornoite This led me to think at one point that it would be great to write a book where the left side of each two pages would be how Adorno saved my life and the right side would be parsing the exact same sections from Adorno but how they really fucked up my life. This was one of these great conceptual ideas that I have on a regular basis that I never act on. It would have been sort of like Cortazar or somebody like that.

Seminal 20th century composer (besides Ellington)

 Well, as far as the composers go, I’ve got a pretty big pantheon. At one point it was Webern Webern Webern, at another, Feldman Feldman Feldman. Janacek has always been very important to me; Stravinsky of course. Scelsi was a revelation. Ligeti really kicks my ass in terms of what kind of clarity and invention I’d like to demand from myself. Lutoslawski freed up so much stuff in me gesturally. I can’t ignore Varese. Since I started teaching, people like Tenney and Christian Wolff have become important models for the link between pedagogy and artistry. Kurtag and Wolpe have been key later influences on my composing. Nothing happens without Cage around somewhere.

Artistic Triumph/Artistic Disappointment

Artistic Triumph? Artistic Disappointment? So much of my work has been trying to get out of the zone of highs and lows; it’s almost a full-time job. I don’t know if it’s an artistic disappointment, but there’s a bunch of improvisers I never got to play with that I wish I had. It’s a long list – way too long. And I almost played with a few of them, which makes it even worse. I could be here all night with this list, so I’ll just mention Derek Bailey. But when he was playing with all of my friends I don’t think I really understood his artistic achievement at that time anyway.

I don’t know if I’ve ever experienced a real triumph. I’ve had great moments, for sure. Midnight at the Kupa Synagogue in Krakow, Poland during the Jewish Culture Festival, which produced my CD Schmutsige Magnaten – Anthony Coleman Plays Gebirtig (Tzadik). That was pretty moving.

“If I could do it all over again, one thing I would do differently…”

There are so many things I would do differently. I wouldn’t be so oppositional. I would make more of an effort, and in situations involving some sort of conflict not stress differences as much as I once did. I have actually become much better at this through dealing with students these last 15 years. Another thing: I would’ve figured out a lot of the issues around practicing and schedule and routine and not acted like the idea of routineis for squares. I’ve also gotten much better at this, but I would have liked to have done this a lot earlier too. As far as the other parts of life are concerned, I definitely have very few regrets.

"A thing that irritates me…."

One thing that irritates me a lot is people’s fear of being critical and the death of critical discourse -  the fact that people feel this incredible need to always be “positive” and “supportive” and that the idea that one can be both supportive and critical at the same time has really gotten lost in this society. When I was first traveling a lot in France and Germany this was one of the most refreshing parts of being on tour in those countries  - people will always tell you what they thought about a concert. However, that got to be a little annoying too, because you don’t always want to hear it right after your concert, but of course you’re not going to be there the next day necessarily. Still, there’s a balance between somebody coming right after the concert and saying “well, you know, I heard you last year and I liked that a lot more” - that’s really not what you want, but that’s the cliché of the German or French audience - and then the American, who’s always like “Great! Wow! What you’re doing is awesome! It’s so great hearing you! Yay!” There’s that, but if I had to make a choice I would choose the critical perspective. I’ve always been interested in critique; I’ve read a lot of critique. I taught Critical Thinking on the Community College level, and when people use the words critical and negativeas though they mean the same thing it’s just an unbelievable misuse of language which has contributed to a lot of decay. On the lighter side, one thing I find funny is musicians who go on about how much they hate critics when they get a bad review and go on and on about how nobody should be a critic, there should be no critics, the only critics should be musicians and then as soon as they get a good review they plaster it all over social media, which all goes to show that they lack a disinterested perspective…I think developing a disinterested perspective is important for everybody, including musicians who are very sensitive about their reviews. By the way, I try to practice with what I preach! It’s not the easiest thing…

"Something I wish I’d understand…"

One thing I wish I understood is the kind of Higher Math or Physics that influence the kind of composers that know about - for example, Fractal Geometry and things like that. Like, really to be able to work inside of that the way that some of my colleagues can. Every once in a while I tell myself that I’m really going to buckle down and do it, but it has not been something that has ever been second nature to me - the ability to work in those more advanced geometric kinds of ways, and I do feel that it’s something that’s missing.

Literature or visual art….?

Both literature and visual art have been very, very influential to everything that I’ve done. I grew up in a pretty cultured milieu, I guess you could say, and I was exposed to a lot of stuff as a kid. I kind of had to rediscover it because I rejected a lot of that at one point, but it definitely gave me a taste for many things. I definitely will say that Beckett is very central to my thinking. Borges too. I love looking at visual art. Obviously I love (it’s almost boring to say, because of the Feldman connection) Philip Guston. But I love many painters – I was loving Caspar David Friedrich before I found out that he was a important influence on Beckett and that was really interesting. A lot of Installation Art when Installation Art was a new phenomenon, and that really marked me and I always kind of wanted to find a way to do a kind of Installation Art in my music - which I never quite achieved - but it definitely influences the way I think about things. People like Ilya Kabakov, Christian Boltanski, Chris Burden… some very formative experiences with their work.

Teaching

As I hinted in a few of these answers, teaching has shifted my perspective in terms of patience, in terms of process – it has been a really invaluable experience. I’ve mentored some incredible artists and that’s been very gratifying, and I’ve had some incredible ensembles. It’s not all fun and games; sometimes they all can drive you crazy. There have definitely been shifts in terms of what people want - Radical Music seems to be a little bit on a downswing at the moment. Fewer students are interested in it than has been the case at other times, and that’s problematic for me, but I know that it all comes in waves or cycles. We could have a long conversation about what those cycles are based on - how they connect to social forces or to economics, but that would be a verylong conversation that would have a lot of controversial aspects to it.

One question that should have been asked but wasn't....

 Well, there are so many other kind of questions. You know, like about filmmakers and the influence of film on my work and, of course, this is something that goes back to when I was at NEC as a student, and I always thought it would be fun to analyze the difference between my playing and Ran’s playing, or my music and Ran’s music without talking about the music at all and just talking about the way we think about films, since it’s funny, because Film Noir is also very important to me but my context for Film Noir is very, very different from Ran’s, both in the way I look at it and our lists of favorite Film Noirs (or Films Noir). Our lists are totally different, as are our ways of seeing and the elements we focus on. All that being said, I am indebted to Ran in many ways. I mean, he was a very strong figure - some things he said to me when I was an Undergraduate were really important, even though I never studied with him formally.

 But this brings up my relationship with Jaki Byard, which was really central to my life. I met Jaki when I was barely a teenager and I studied with him all through High School. I never studied with him in NEC -  I was only a Jazz Major my first year and then I switched into the Composition Department. But that’s a whole other book - the story of my studies with Jaki. I knew him in a very different way from many other people. First of all, because I studied with him so young. Second of all, because I didn’t study with him in school. He took me under his wing because I really was a little kid. Many beautiful experiences and many regrets, and so much sadness about his terrible ending.